New York Times Halves Monthly Free Article Views To Ten 178
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has announced that, starting in April, visitors to NYTimes.com will only be able to access 10 free articles a month, down from 20 articles currently. The NYTimes paywall was put into effect last year, and seems to have been a success, with nearly half a million digital subscriptions to all of Times Co.'s websites; this despite the fact that the paywall is trivial to circumvent (for example, by deleting all cookies from nytimes.com)."
The submitter included a link to the WSJ article on the change, which appears to also be paywalled.
Re:"trivial to circumvent" (Score:4, Interesting)
And the point is a polite reminder that they can't get enough advertising to cover the cost of the content you want, so if you want the content you should pay them.
There are a lot of ways around the paywall. I don't think they are deeply serious about making it half free, half subscription, because people who don't want to pay really won't, and they may come up with a relatively bad scheme to make the NYT involuntarily free if they can't simply circumvent it. I'd rather those who know just delete cookies, than start doing a daily/hourly torrent dump of my website or something. If you annoy pirates enough they'll come up with such and easy way to pirate that no one will ever pay. The NYT seems to have fairly successfully (for the moment) found a middle ground between getting people to pay, while giving away content to those who absolutely wouldn't pay anyway.
Can't RTFA (Score:4, Interesting)
If people don't like it they can get their news somewhere else
How many NYTimes.com articles does Slashdot link to per month? Expect a bunch of "can't RTFA" comments that until now had been reserved for the major scholarly journals and WSJ.
Re:Oh Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it's working. I pay for it, not because I can't get around the paywall, but because they provide a product I think is worth the money.
500,000 subscribers (Score:4, Interesting)
According to a quick Google:
Half a million PAYING subscribers is in line with the number of people with an Iridium satellite phone, the number of people who use MuveMusic on their smartphone, or the number of people who pay to play Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, etc.
I.e. statistically insignificant, especially if you only count the US. I can't name anyone in the above groups, for example, and it's the amount of people Spotify attract in just two months.
I can't remember the last time I saw an NYT article (despite, a few years ago, coming across them all the time online). I certainly can't remember the last time I tried to "bypass" anything to see a website like that. Or the last time I subscribed to any website (I did have a subscription to LWN.net - and Slashdot - at one point but more as a donation to them than providing any benefit to me).
Hell, the last time I actually bought a paper, there *wasn't* a decent online version of any UK paper (but I was still getting all my news from the Internet), and the paper wasn't even for me.
You can try singing about your paywall all you like but the more restrictions you put on non-paywall activities, the more it confirms my suspicion - they know they will die if they don't get more subscription readers, if they aren't already dying. If they were happy and comfortable and making lots of profit, they wouldn't care about the article limit, or they'd raise it, or they'd have "free" versions and "premium" versions and not have to crowbar you into the premium version all the time.
My granddad's generation - who took whatever news was fed to them - would probably be that loyal to a paper, or even a political party, without thinking. Nowadays? If you don't put your news online where I can see it, it won't get seen.